KristyWes

Salty Tears of White-Collar Rage

I haven't been enjoying my job too much lately. By "lately" I mean the past 6 or 7 months. Or perhaps more truthfully, off-and-on since 2002. This week has been especially bad, though. Or perhaps more truthfully, my attitude has been especially bad. I gotta work on that. The circumstances of my current career may be beyond my control, but my attitude and outlook while at this job - well, these are my responsibility.

So I'm trying to replace my internal running dialogue of discontent with a little levity, focus more on the good around me and not just the bad & annoying, and keep trusting that God wants to lift my spirit higher than these beige cubicle walls. Here are some steps I took today:

A) Listened Up: I traded in a soundtrack of my own whining for some tunes on Pandora Radio. Do you know this site? It's a free internet radio station that customizes play lists based on your musical preferences. I've got a sweet mix of The Weepies/Frank Sinatra playing now, with a little Keb' Mo' and The Frames thrown in for good measure.

B) Listed Up: Instead of laboring over mental lists of grievances, I'm going to be on the lookout for the humorous. Like today: called a midtown kosher restaurant to make a lunch reservation for one of my bosses. The recorded message that played in lieu of hold-muzak featured a woman with an Australian-ish accent describing the restaurant's offerings. She said their food was Mediterannean, with a "eunich Asian twist." I'm guessing the word she actually said was "unique," but I made sure to jot down "eunich." Because that was a whole lot funnier. Though not at all kosher.

C) Word Up: I'm beginning to resent the amount of head space that my work-related accounting terms and acronyms are occupying. So I decided to counter-act their clutter by adding a new Hebrew word to my vocabulary each day, via Akhlah's daily email. Today's word was "cat." Which brings me to #D...

D) Up Dog: I changed my computer's boring, standard desktop image to a tiled background of this Pimp Dog:When I start to worry that an Excel spreadsheet is about to make my eyes bleed, I take a little gander at this grinning velvet-clad canine and kinda can't help but grin back. I think I'm going to make frequent changes to my desktop going forward, so feel free to send me your best (and by "best," I mean "worst" and "most innapropriate") images and I'll get them in the rotation.